‘Always yours sincerely, ‘W. E. GLADSTONE.’
To this Mr. Bright replied two days afterwards as follows:
‘I am sorry my speech has so greatly irritated you. It has been as great a grief to me to speak as I have spoken as it can have been to you to listen or to read. You say it is a gross charge to say that you concealed your thoughts last November. Surely, when you urged the constituencies to send you a Liberal majority large enough to make you independent of Mr. Parnell and his party, the Liberal party and the country understood you to ask for a majority to enable you to resist Mr. Parnell, not to make a complete surrender to him. You object to my quotations about a conspiracy “marching through rapine to the breakup of the United Kingdom,” and you say there is now no such conspiracy against the payment of rent and the union of the countries. I believe there is now such a conspiracy, and that it is expecting and seeking its further success through your measures. You complain that I charge you with a want of frankness in regard to the Land Purchase Bill. You must know that a large number of your supporters are utterly opposed to that Bill. If you tie the two Bills together, their difficulty in dealing with them will be much increased and their liberty greatly fettered. I think your friends and your opponents and the country have a right to know your intentions on so great a matter, when you are asking them to elect a Parliament in your favour. Your language seems to me rather a puzzle than an explanation, and that of your colleagues, though contradictory, is not much clearer. “I have done what I could to keep out of controversy with you.” I have not urged any man in Parliament, or out of it, to vote against you. I have abstained from speaking in public until I was in the face of my constituents, who have returned me unopposed to the new Parliament, and to them I was bound to explain my opinion of, and my judgment on, your Irish Bills. I stand by what I have said, and shall be surprised if the new Parliament be more favourable to your Irish measures than the one you have thought it necessary to dissolve. Though I thus differ from you at this time and on this question, do not imagine that I can ever cease to admire your great qualities or to value the great services you have rendered to your country.